That striking phrase—“how to philosophize with a hammer”—is, of course, Nietzsche’s and he used it to imply the act of demolishing idols, to engage in the business of iconoclasm. I use it to indicate, quite candidly, what I propose to do: to attempt an iconoclastic analysis of the expiring intellectual rationale of liberalism and to chart the causes for the increasing collapse of its political effectiveness.

In adopting the posture of the iconoclast, the philosopher must have certain misgivings—and I use the word “philosopher” not in any covertly honorific sense, but only to identify one’s profession, a vocation whose modern orientations suggest a more detached viewpoint than that implied by the Nietzschean call to shatter shibboleths with cudgels. I am reasonably content, however, that the variety of iconoclasm wewill here engage in is philosophically respectable for two reasons: (1) There are clearly times in which the rationalistic dedication of the philosopher alone impels him to take up the enterprise of destructive analysis in the interests of cultural therapy; and (2) Ours is an hour in which the desperate travail of our society makes academic detachment not merely an idle luxury, but the abrogation of very rudimentary responsibilities—which are not the obligations of intellectuals only, but are those of any member of the social covenant. Consequently, our iconoclasm is spawned by the very real conviction that disaster is possible and even probable, although not inevitable, and that the threat of cultural disaster, broadly interpreted to mean the advent of a new epoch of barbarism, may be extinguished if we are willing to face unpleasant facts and prudently reckon the shape of future conditions and the forms of cultural therapy that would be both appropriate and effective. Iconoclasm has the great merit of being avivid variety of intellectual slum-clearance.

If this iconoclastic critique of current political life is not to be merely an exercise in eccentricity, then we are obliged to make clear what is meant by liberalism and to justify the contention that it is, in fact, dying—and, what must be entered as the cause of death.

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I want to give the term liberalism a very broad meaning and not, by the way, a derogatory one. The demise of the hegemony of liberalism is an empirical proposition: much within the liberal tradition was highly admirable; the more than two centuries of its domination included much of what we boast of as our most humane civilization.

The liberalism to which I refer is the comprehensive political tradition that substantially begins with Locke. In this sense, liberalism, about which we shall be more specific in a moment, provided the basis for the continuity of moderate, centrist political leadership and control that remained virtually unbroken within the Western democracies up to our current era. From the Glorious Revolution to the 1960s, the hold of liberal politicians was well-nigh complete, save for brief episodes of radical experimentation, such as fascism, and scattered conservative resurgences, such as Tory Democracy.

Besides its very considerable historical metamorphosis, liberalism had at its core one principal idea: equilibrium—a political system constructed upon the balancing of interests and the reconciliations of social objectives. In a larger sense, the equilibriumist nature of liberalism was the result of its pervasive utilitarianism, which becomes more explicitly relativistic by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the realm of social ethics. This Weltanschauung produced many of the well-known characteristics of liberalism: majoritarianism, pluralism, secularism and legal positivism. At root, liberalism was inclined toward proceduralism rather than substantive theory and in its purer forms was generally permissive and individualistic. This was especially to be noticed in the century after Locke which featured a concern for the matter of continuous consent and took a functionalistic view of majoritarianism. Such aviewpoint is well-developed in The Federalist Papers with its emphasis on neoclassical republicanism and the mixed polity.

One of the curiosities about the history of liberalism was that the Industrial Revolution intensified its political ascendency and yet the aftermath of that technological upheaval brought into being pressures with which liberalism was ultimately unable to cope. If J. S. Mill was the epitomization of nineteenth-century liberalism, then John Dewey well represents the evolution of liberalism in our century. The similarities are apparent, but the differences are also highly significant. In the widest sense, twentieth-century liberalism was principally concerned with the extension of the democratic principle; post-Lockean liberalism was, in any case, the mainstream of pro-democratic thought. Pre-twentieth-century liberalism had been content, by and large, to restrict this democratic principle—which was, in essence, egalitarian participation—to the legal and political spheres. After 1900, the thrust was to extend this democracy into the explicitly social sphere. The primary motivation for liberalism’s adoption of social democracy had a two-fold cause: (1) the infallibilist majoritarian theories produced by Rousseau and Bentham; and (2) a growingly collectivistic and altruistic concept of human nature, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had split liberal theory between an extreme and embattled individualism (well-illustrated by social darwinism) and the emerging social democrats, some of them under direct socialist influence.

There were, at base, four motifs of twentieth-century liberalism that seriously modified the historical tradition: (1) the assertive egalitarianism earlier referred to; (2) the immense impact of positivism (and its off-shoot, pragmatism) on liberal democratic thought; (3) an increasing support of governmental activity and centralization; and (4) a more radical conception of ethical relativism.

Permit me to comment briefly on these alterations in traditional liberalism. The twentieth century emphasis on egalitarianism was the result of many influences, but perhaps of prime significance was the abandonment of the natural rights theory in favor of a newvision of intrinsic equality. This represented a change from the “as if” concept of equality to one arguing for intrinsic equality in essentially psycholo-gistic terms: all men were equal because of the possession of an ineffable personality. Thus, equality was not to be an equality of treatment in crucial public areas, but a comprehensive equality of social status on the grounds that even private social discrimination was injurious to the human personality.

The effect of neo-positivism on liberal democratic theory is not to be underestimated. The rise of social science in North America proceeded from positivistic assumptions, by and large, and this emerging intellectual community provided not only the principal theoretical apologias for liberal democracy, but framed its theoretical evolutions in very authoritative terms. So complete was this pro-liberal and pro-positivistic allegiance of the social sciences that Harold Lasswell could announce that political science ought to he defined as the “policy science of democracy.” The genesis of twentieth-century liberalism’s distinct social theory really begins with Graham Wallas.

Abandoning the more traditional connection with laissez faire, twentieth-century liberalism embraced a more overtly collectivistic view of government function and power, which, in the social democratic setting, led to varying degrees of economic and social planning with emphasis on what eventually became labeled as the “welfare state.”

Lastly, twentieth-century liberalism pushed ethical relativism far beyond the utilitarianism of J. S. Mill (although not further, perhaps, than that of Bentham). The expressions of this ubiquitous relativism were everywhere in evidence: in legal theory, in political theory and practice, in the general cultural standards and in the parameters of political respectability. The cumulative effect of this ethical relativism was to virtually destroy the existing corpus of the civic ethic and this was generally held to be liberating on the grounds that pro-liberal theorists exhibited such an intense antipathy and fear of authoritarianism that any suggestion of the non-relativity of value was vigorously opposed.

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We are now reasonably close to what the contemporary journalists mean when they invoke the word “liberalism,” the reformist, popularly-oriented, mildly collectivistic social democratic premises identified with the pro-democratic theorists and the political tradition of Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. This very fleeting perusal of liberalism is certainly not intended as a definitive account, but is meant to provide a brief background for a number of, what I think, are pertinent observations.

The first of these is that while twentieth-century liberalism represented a significant departure from the past, it did not veer fundamentally from the flow of liberalism. It remained utilitarian and equilibriumistic; it stood by its broad proceduralism, its pluralistic libertarianism, its majoritarianism and essential belief in moderation and fair play. In terms of political leadership, twentieth-century liberalism remained predominantly moderate, eclectic and, in terms of its own orientations, pragmatic.

However, certain theoretical proclivities were arising in the twentieth century. Social democratic liberalism had grown markedly less flexible and more doctrinaire and it became increasingly enmeshed in its own mythologies. Four of these myths were particularly debilitating:

(1) the first myth was that of the infallibility of a quantitative majority. liberalism accepted this premise—and rejected a graduated majoritarianism —on the basis of a curious blend of Rousseauistic and Benthamite ideas. Not entirely willing to accept the pristine simplicity of Bentham’s assertion that the majority is always right because there is no other viable criterion to appeal to, democratic liberals engrafted on to it a Rousseauistic mysticism, the notion of a latent “folk wisdom” waiting to direct the national fate at crucial moments. This argument reduces to the view that while the individual citizen is largely uninformed and incapable of rational political choice, citizens en masse release some variety of collective judgment and wisdom. This appears not only a myth pro forma, but also on the basis of democratic liberalism’s own empirical investigations.

(2) The second myth revolves around the idea that the principle of equality extends beyond the concept of the sanctity of the person to equal capability in areas of skill and judgment. It was one thing to contend that men ought to he treated as equals in order that they could achieve that of which they are individually capable and quite another to enforce equality in defiance of the diversities and talents of men. Liberal democracy clings to this thesis in the face of reason and evidence.

(3) Liberal democracy stubbornly refused to modify its rigorous environmentalism, claiming that virtually all of men’s assorted problems could be soled by the amelioration of the environment, primarily in material terms. Its reductionistic views of human personality refused to bend to more advanced psychological and philosophical argument and its political theory could be reduced, when all is said and done, to proposals for governmental action designed to physically and economically reshape the patterns of the environment. This predilection helps to account for the obsolescent quality inherent in current political appeals from the liberals—about which, more later.

(4) Liberalism’s moral relativism seems to be embraced not on the basis of its philosophical tenability or even its social efficacy but, rather, for the negative reason that the introduction of the idea of objective standards would usher in some type of social or political authoritarianism. Liberals look at standards like some regard the Fifth Amendment: the acceptance of anystandards—in art, in literature, in morals, in tastes—would quash one’s immunity from having standards enforced in all aspects of life and against one’s will. This results in a virtual negation of a qualitative dimension, even that vague and shifting one enjoyed by nineteenth-century liberalism.

This banishment of standards takes a queer twist among some contemporary liberals who, in what can only be described as a sort of passion, seek to implement this relativity by, in fact, deifying the conventionally lower standards of tastes, as if to try to compensate for what they must believe to be the perverse intractability of traditional notions of worth. Thus, the effort to reduce society to the general mean of the so-called “common man” places liberal democrats in the somewhat paradoxical position of extolling as superior virtues the predispositions of the presumably less enlightened segments of the community. The New Left, the arch-foes of liberalism, have pursued this tendency in a far more intense and radical manner: for them, the pathological becomes admirable.

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All of these liberal dogmas, substantially mythological in the less esoteric sense of that word, (majoritarian infallibility, intrinsic egalitarianism, doctrinaire environmentalism and ethical relativism) combine to illustrate contemporary liberalism’s utter preoccupation with quantitative arrangement and reform, to the exclusion of significant attention to qualitative or normative social problems.

This quantitative and narrowly empirical predisposition has posed for the democratic liberal an ironic and embarrassing predicament. He has become the victim of his own empirical investigations. As twentieth-century social science refined its methodology, especially in the area of measurement and quantitative analysis, certain shocking revelations wereforthcoming. The results provided by this investigative rigor appeared categorically to refute many of the optimistic democratic tenets. In the region of voting behavior analysis, it became increasingly apparent that a vast portion of the electorate made their personal decisions on the great issues of the day on the basis of little or no information, were swayed by palpably trivial considerations and, behaviorally, in no way squared with the illusion of an informed and responsible body politic.

At first, there was a certain amount of nervousness in democratic quarters, although the more sweeping implications were denied. Then there followed an almost bitter acceptance of the iconoclastic import of this empirical evidence and what then transpired was a quite extraordinary shift in the nominal defenses of social democracy. Now, the democratic theorists sought a way out by attempting to frame an essentially elitist theory, borrowed in large part from European sociology in general and Pareto’s “circulation of elites” in particular. Democracy was to be, in this new formulation, rescued by granting the necessity of control by elites both in a formal and an informal sense—which were envisioned ascompeting for power by some process of popular selection, Robert Dahl and Giovanni Sartori, to name but two, began talking about “elective polyarchies” and other exotic political morphologies. This appears to be—to borrow Henry Adam’s phrase—the “degradation of the democratic dogma.” It should be quickly pointed out, too, that these so-called “democratic elites” are not to be distinguished by ethical or intellectual pre-eminence, but only by their ability to organize for power competition. Even elitism was supposed to be relativistic.

Liberalism in our century has suffered, too, from an increasing pomposity that has manifestly hindered its survival potential. I mean by this that liberals began to feel that they were not participants or contestants in the political debate but, rather, the eternal custodians of the holy tablets, the arbiters and conscience-keepers of the culture, the umpires of the political game and so should stand aloof from the presumably sordid bickerings of lesser ideologies. This gratuitous attitude arose, in part, from their two-and-a-half-centuries old control of Western political institutions but it was, also, in part attributable to the accelerating mythology of contemporary liberalism and its somewhat haughty disdain for engaging in hard argument with minority theories. The non-Communist Left it had largely absorbed; the Communist world was physically held at bay and the internal threat was not critically serious—and the Right, especially the conservative Right, the liberals merely ignored as intellectual vagrants.

This lofty liberal sententiousness created a severe vulnerability when two factors beset the leadership of the liberal moderates: the attack of the New Left and the crumbling of the popular consensus upon which this leadership had stood since Adams turned over his desk to Jefferson. Contemporary liberalism does not yet know how deeply it is in trouble and it is befuddled by the sheer savagery of the attacks made upon it from both the militant radical intelligentsia and liberalism’s own erstwhile followers who find themselves menaced by the collapse of liberal guarantees of order, security and the rule of law. Liberalism seems either unwilling or unable to defend itself against the assaults launched against it; it cannot get itself into fighting trim, as it were, since it seems unable to strip away its self-congratulatory flabbiness. It also reveals, as I have written elsewhere, an almost morbid preference for self-destruction.

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The major cause of the soon-to-come death of liberalism I have yet to deal with and in order to do so we must return to the ramifications of the Industrial Revolution. The great time of trial for the moderate liberal leadership of the Western democracies came early in this century. The effects of rampant technology were beginning to provoke profound social changes. Society was very rapidly becoming industrialized, urbanized, dominated by technical innovation and was, consequently, far more complex and interdependent. Social life was increasingly computerized, automated and sanitized. Man’s habitat, indeed, was being drastically remodeled.

It was obvious enough that these forces would effect crucial changes in social life at a very basic level. Three consequences could be predicted: (1) a very serious diminishment of the sense of individual potency—the conviction on the part of individual men that they could control and guide their personal destinies; (2) a considerable deprivation of personal freedom; and (3) a marked reduction of rudimentary individual gratifications.

Unless one wished to propose some sort of neo-agrarian artificiality, these effects following from the full course of the Industrial Revolution were inevitable. This was the kind of world, the kind of society, one was going to have. But the political consequences of these social dislocations were enormous. Twentieth-century man was going to be confused, frustrated and angry; anomie was going to grow to the proportions of amass neurosis. A general cultural malaise was predictable. A failure to deal with it would spell the most ruinous consequences: violence, anarchy and repression would follow.

This was the critical moment for twentieth-century liberalism; this was its great historical test. It would have to use boldness and imagination to offer a new style of political leadership, built upon teaching men how to accept this new existence and to offer compensatory freedoms and satisfactions to replace those swept away by the urban technology. It would have to face the problem of reconstructing the idea of the human community.

Liberal leadership failed utterly to do this. It set about, rather, to placate these deep-seated desires and anxieties by offering a “square deal” or a “fair deal” or a “new deal,” all of which came to mean enhancing the prospects for consumption, to make the rabbit-warren culture not any more existentially justifiable or endurable, but only more comfortable or more diverting. The “waste land” of Mr. Eliot had arrived. Liberalism misjudged the early signs of cultural panic; it assumed that a blend of economic affluence and appeals to mass vanity would allay the nagging fears of impotence, the loss of personal freedom and the mounting sterility of life.

When the panic sysmptoms showed themselves more vividly, the liberal moderates reacted in a most peculiar fashion. Being unable to lead, in any imaginative sense, they were also unable to govern. Under attack, even the relatively mild forms of it earlier in the century, their will to govern dissipated and they began progressively to lose a decisive hold over the society. They could not act internally with resolution and so they temporized, playing once again their tried-and-true tactic of balancing interests off against each other. But by the beginning of the post-World War II period, this fragmentation was assuming alarming proportions; it was beginning to destroy the stable basis of liberal power and authority. By the 1960s, open insurrection was not an impossible development and in the West the liberal moderates were about to fight a last-ditch battle to retain their control, but too late and with too little.

The pressures that ensued from the liberal failure of imagination and will were manifested, in part, by swings of mass expectation regarding the efficacy of political remedy. Popular expectations ranged from inordinate enthusiasm regarding what politics was capable of accomplishing to subsequent periods of apolitical pessimism in which it was assumed that nothing worthwhile could be realized by political action. Politicians were thought of as talismanic figures one day and hopelessly corrupt ignoramuses the next. These periodic “swings” grew more rapid as the century wore on and the fluctuation of feelings grew more extreme—the liberal leadership could not control them, but was caught in their convolutions. These emotional “binges” followed by reciprocating “hang-overs” were bound to create a situation of sufficient fear and chaos that a real live revolutionary movement was altogether predictable.

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Finally, then, the liberal “establishment” found itself under overt revolutionary attack. Liberalism was not prepared for this because it did not sense the underlying causes of social anxiety that this revolutionary ferment fed upon and it continued to predicate its political appeals on the classic issues that had previously moved the electorate. The two American political parties, both predominately liberal in outlook, did not even foresee the possibility of major political realignment in response to the increasingly ideological character of public thought, in contrast to the customary divisions of primarily economic interests. Events moved rapidly. Profoundly concerned with social issues (touching upon the three conditions described earlier) and jabbed by fear regarding the ability of the state to guarantee security and maintain order, the foundational liberal coalition (within both parties) began to fall apart. Radical elements split off, aggrieved ethnic minorities moved outside conventional political channels, a strong right-wing reaction was notable, especially among those elements earlier most congenial to popular liberalism. Three things were happening: (1) the long obscured social issues were rising to the surface and replacing those of essentially economic genesis and advantage; (2) major segments of the electorate were moving into areas of political pressure and action outside those developed within the traditions of liberalism; and (3) elements of the population were moving out to the Right and Left ends of the political continuum in hopes of social remedy. In short, the liberal consensus was—and is—coming apart at the seams. In my view, the contest between Nixon and Humphrey in 1968 represented the last and almost theatrical stand of conventional liberal politics. It began a relatively brief hiatus before the era of apocalyptical politics.

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What will follow upon the collapse of this long liberal domination? I am convinced that it will not be very pleasant. While not a liberal philosophically, life was entirely bearable with the liberal moderates in charge. There is much to be said for pluralism. I do not anticipate such permissive serenity in the remaining years of the century.

The death of liberalism will create a deep political vacuum, especially when one considers the longevity of the liberal ascendency. It is like the Julian Emperors coming to an end and the Barracks Emperors taking over. We are certainly in for a period of extremism and rapidly fluctuating political and social experimentation. This highly fluid era may well feature wholesale violence and periodic despotic purgatives. One feature of it is predictable: We will see a revival of ideology and a tendency to cast politics in a totalitarian mold to the extent that these ideologies will be increasingly doctrinaire and prescriptive over a very wide range of human activities. This is why I have dubbed it the era of “apocalyptical politics”; we will choose between apocalypses—but only for a time.

There are two alternatives that I do not consider very feasible. One is that liberalism will somehow survive and keep its house from falling down. Traditional liberalism is too seriously compromised for this and it lacks the vigor to recoup its preeminence. The other possibility I discount is a reasonably successful and permanent revolution generated by a coalition of left-wing revolutionaries. I could easily envision an outright insurrection in the United States mounted by a fusion of nihilistic adventurers and hard-core Leninists and Maoists, but I cannot consider such a domestic rebellion as being successful. In the first place, I think that more-or-less orthodox style revolutions are things of the past in highly developed industrialized societies, because the force monoply of the existing state is so decisive and the possibilities for attaining parity in force on the part of the revolutionaries is very remote. Our present domestic revolutionists, to add another reason, are not sufficiently skillful for success via a relatively nonviolent coup; in addition, they lack cohesiveness and suffer from almost persistent devisiveness.

What are the more realistic possibilities? There are two, I think. The first involves a strong right-wing “back lash” with primitivistic and even neo-fascist overtones. The second possibility is a rather mild but uncompromising shift to the Right, but dominated, at least intellectually, by a basically conservative orientation.

I firmly believe that the most serious future problem we face is what kind of a reaction wemay get in response to the provocations of the radical Left. Those fighting under the black banner of Anarchism may conceivably have to be put down with the sword, but in what fashion and by whom? What values will prevail in the aftermath? While one can appreciate the provocations that have beset the American people and can measure and understand the accumulations of frustration that the aridity of contemporary life inflicts, unmediated anger and an enthusiasm for simplistic solutions are dangerous ingredients to stir into the public mood. They could well usher in a period of political repression. I should like, in this connection, to very briefly draw a distinction between repression and order. I amconvinced that the latter condition is the first responsibility of government and that there exists today a distinct threat to nominal order. Therefore, I am not in a position to compromise over the imperative necessity for the maintenance of order, but this does not mean that one favors repression, as thetwo terms are, in actuality, antithetical.

We use, in fact, the word order intwo senses in common usage: We speak of “order” as being an arrangement of elements, such as a “word order” or a “batting order.” We use “order,” of course, to denote civil tranquility, as in “law and order.” These two loose definitions of order are related, in that social order isan emanation of a more fundamental order, which, for convenience, we might call “ontological order.” Common to both uses of the term is regularity;social order is the regularization of relationships within a natural system, in this case, society. As is true within the nonhuman world, human social order rests upon a principle, or principles, of regularity that is not the product of the will—individual or collective—of the society itself, but is an external principle. This principle (or principles), although not as yet fully disclosed in an empirical way, is largely actualized in the historical process by the broad ethical and juristic axioms that appear to be both trans-temporal and trans-cultural, although their precise articulation is sensitive to the singularities of particular cultures. Thus, order is, in fact, a norm—both theoretically and concretely; disorder or irregularity is aberrational.

“Repression” I take to be an irregularity, the application of force of some type which is socially generated and is not derived from external principle and, hence, is in violation of the concept of order. Social order must legitimately be enforced, as there is not universal recognition of the mandate of external principle. The issue is between the coercion necessary to maintain the regularity of social relationships and coercion employed to impose the will of one individual or group upon another.

Contemporary liberalism’s refusal to accord a first priority to the maintenance of bona fide social order, an order principally enshrined in its own recognized legal codes, has so weakened these social regularities that the result is, even now, the widespread appearance of repressive forms of social coercion, of which organized and violent civil disobedience is the most obvious and flagrant. But the demise of liberalism and the subsequent power vacuum invites the intensification of repression in lieu of social order. Many of those who are now reacting against the threat of leftist insurrectionary activity and who rally to the cry of “law and order” are not advocates of order, but are admirers of repression. This is apparent from these people’s restless dissatisfaction with legalism and juristic restraint. Since the state cannot guarantee minimal order, their argument goes, we must impose it ourselves. There is a certain truth in this observation, it must be admitted, and yet the most lamentable fate to befall the “rule of law” would be its replacement by a doctrine of “self-protection,” of the Vigilance Committee. Such is the stuff of repression rather than order.

The rising anxiety and counter-militancy against the excesses of the Left do not necessarily mean that our society is turning to conservatism—as some careless journalists suggest. Much of the effective opposition to would-be revolutionaries is not mounted by conservatives (in any precise meaning of that term). The so-called “silent majority” is not made up of conservatives. Mr. Nixon is not a conservative. George Wallace and his more-or-less plebian adherents are not conservatives. Indeed, the problem for the contemporary conservative is to decide how far to make common cause with the elements of the anti-Left. Some prices for a unified front may be too dear for the conservative to pay.

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There are three main factors that separate contemporary conservatism from the current solidarity of the political Right: One of these factors is the primacy of order as defined and discussed earlier. The second isconservatism’s commitment to the aristocratic principle;and the third is its dedication to compassion. Space prohibits me from discussing these characteristics in any detail, but by aristocratic principle, I mean conservatism’s ancient acceptance of the idea of personal dedication to self-cultivation in accordance with certain generally-acceded to standards and the notion that levels of attainment in self-cultivation affect the social division of labor. Conservatism is also possessed with a sense of humanity that denies that life can be defined in terms of the survival of the fittest. It rejects bourgeoisruthlessness. Historically, conservatives have despised those who place either avarice or political ambition ahead of those aspects oflife considered by them to be more fundamental: the life of the spirit, the ethical realization, artistic creativity and even mundane enjoyment. These priorities create, in the conservative tradition, a feeling for the universal human bond and summon up the obligations of service and compassion. Admittedly, by some current standards, this conservative social sensitivity and compassion is “paternalistic.” It is largely neo-Platonic and it certainly does not rest upon the type of egalitarian definitions common to modern liberalism. There is, in truth, a visible strain of noblesse obligein the conservative outlook. Yet, the conservative defends himself in this particular by pointing out that all of the highest forms of love represent dependent relationships, a reciprocal obligation that is hierarchical, as in the love of God and man or parent and child. To the conservative, a definition of this worldview that I once described as “the application of Christian chivalry into the area of political arrangements” appears neither quixotic nor absurd, but simply the social manifestation of man’s more enlightened view of the civic ethic.

These three themes of order, aristocracy and compassion separate conservatism from much of the so-called political Right. The great bulk of conservative thought in this century—and I refer to genuine conservative thought as contrasted with the writings of nineteenth century-style liberals and social darwinists—has been confined to relatively esoteric spheres, philosophical and literary. Its attacks on contemporary liberalism have been searching and even devastating, but it was never the purpose of conservatism to pull down the liberal edifice by political means, but only to preserve the Tory tradition, to add an indispensable character to the grand social debate and to hope to convert liberals from their erring ways. By and large, conservatives were simply content to live under the reign of liberalism with its once-potent legal guarantees and its pluralistic liberty.

The picture is now radically changed. Liberalism is dying and with it all the comforts it once provided to dissenting opinions. Conservatism cannot very well go to its aid, regardless of the existence of common values between them, because the cause is lost and conservatism’s influence in that quarter is too meagre. Two other forces obviously confront contemporary conservatism: the Left and the Right. The Left is not only its enemy philosophically, but it has declared that it seeks to obliterate in actuality most of the social values conservatism deems vital to preserve. Like it or not, conservatism has only two courses of action open to it: (1) pursue its detachment and, in consequence, maintain a practical social impotency; or (2) participate in the rightist coalition. It cannot really select (1) unless it has already written off Western culture, but (2) is not as simple as it might seem. It is not simple, but it is also the most important challenge to face conservatism since the French Revolution.

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What conservatism must do is to control and modify the angry reaction of the Right. It must do this by the force of its moral arguments and example. It must temper the repressive and anti-legalistic proclivities of the non-conservative Right by educating it—and quickly—to the necessity of order, the preservation of standards, personal and social, and the indispensability of compassion and humanitarian concern. If a sort of neo-fascist excess is to be avoided, conservatism must fight a battle on two fronts: The first front involves propping up a faltering society against the ravages of the new Jacobinism by reviving society’s sense of honor and justice; and the second front requires it to transmogrify the inarticulate emotions of the anti-revolutionary majority into a sensitive and bold regard for the qualitative reform of society.

How to plunge into the present social struggle so asnot to be irrelevant to the outcome and, at the same time, preserve the intellectual and ethical objectivity and dispassion that are equally demanded? That is the awesome task of conservatism as it unhappily surveys the wreckage of liberalism.